Discontinuing the Introducing Emblem Series

It's been a while since my last post in the Introducing Emblem series, and having had some time to mull it over, I've decided to discontinue the series. It seems silly to be writing what is essentially user documentation as a series of blog posts, when I could be writing user documentation in a more suitable place, such as the wiki for the project's GitHub page.

I've migrated the useful content from the previous blog posts into the wiki. I've also added two new wiki pages there, which would otherwise have made up this blog post. In the new pages, I cover TypeBoundMaps, and how to use emblem's maps with types that do not have exactly one type parameter.

I'll put out a note on Twitter or wherever when I add significant new content to the wiki in the future.

Introducing Emblem - TypeKeyMaps

This is the third post in the Introducing Emblem series, where I discuss a reflection-based utility library I have developed called emblem. If you want to try emblem out on your project, follow these instructions. Or read this if you just want to explore try it out in the Scala REPL.

In the previous post, we looked at the core building block of the emblem library: the TypeKey. In this post, we begin to explore the utility of the TypeKey using TypeKeyMaps.

Catching Up: Writing Again!

So I just finished up this blog post, Just What the Heck is Amortized Constant Time Anyway?, over the last couple weeks. And I felt odd once I finally posted it, because of the total lack of personal context as to where this post is coming from. After all, it's been over a year since my previous post. So I wanted to write a quick "catching up" post, which is mostly about the fact the I am writing again!

What the Heck is Amortized Constant Time Anyway?

Effective use of the Scala Collections Library benefits from a solid understanding of the performance characteristics of the operations on a collection. In this regard, the web page Scala Collections Performance Characteristics is a valuable resource, as it summarizes the performance characteristics of various collections in easy to read charts. We see two interesting entries on these charts: effective constant time and amortized constant time. Just what do these terms mean, and how does it affect us as Scala programmers?

In this article, we will discuss amortized constant time - a performance characteristic for mutable collections such as Java's ArrayList, HashMap and HashSet. We'll address effective constant time - seen in immutable collections such as Scala's Vector, HashMap and HashSet - in a later essay.